The White House — Fall, 1963

People talked about him long before you ever understood why.

They whispered his name like it meant something bigger than a man. But you knew him before you knew the weight of his title—long before the cameras, the speeches, the impossible responsibility he carried on his shoulders.

Jack had known your father since they were boys. But he’d known you almost as long.

Not long enough to be part of your childhood— but long enough that he’d been there for the parts that actually mattered.

He was there the year you broke your arm, sitting beside your hospital bed while your father rushed through traffic. He was there the first time you entered the Capitol, letting you trail behind him through marble halls like you belonged there. He was there when you turned fifteen, sending a book with the note: “This one will change you. Don’t let your father see the last chapter.” He had always been there — quietly, deliberately, in a way that made people wonder.

Your father called it loyalty. Others called it favoritism. You didn’t know what to call it. Only that Jack made room for you in a life that had no room for anything.

And the world had no idea.

That was how you ended up standing in the Oval Office now, at an hour when most of Washington slept. Snow pressed against the tall windows. The lamps were low. The building felt hollow, like it had been set aside just for the two of you.

Jack sat at the Resolute Desk with his sleeves rolled up, papers abandoned for the moment he saw the book in your hands.

He nodded toward it. “You brought it.”

You crossed the room slowly, the carpet swallowing your footsteps. “I thought you forgot you asked.”

“I don’t forget our things,” he said. Not your poems, not your voice, not you—but he didn’t say it aloud.

You opened the book to the page you had bookmarked three days ago, when he phoned your father and asked if you could stop by “for a moment.” A moment that always became an hour. Sometimes two.

You inhaled, steadying yourself, and began.

“Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future…”

Your voice settled into the quiet, drifting over the desk, over the room that carried the weight of a nation. Jack didn’t interrupt. He never did when you read. He listened the way other men prayed—still, intent, as if something in the words explained something he didn’t dare ask aloud.

As you read, the memories layered with every line. Hyannis Port. Boston winters.

Those late evenings when he’d say he had ten minutes, and somehow you’d end up talking until the lamps burned low.

No one else knew about those moments. No one else saw the way he softened around you. No one else understood the strange, unspoken thing that threaded through every year you’d known him.

“…If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.”

Your voice faltered for a breath. Because he understood that. And you did too.

When you finished the final line:

“What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present,”

the room went silent again—heavy, familiar.

Jack’s eyes lifted to yours, that tired, searching look he only let you see.

“You read it differently,” he said quietly.

“You hear it differently,” you answered.

He smiled, faintly, like he knew exactly what you meant.

And he did.

“Stay,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Just for a little.”

You sat. Because you always stayed when he asked.

Because for reasons neither of you ever said out loud, history kept putting the two of you back in the same room.

And neither of you ever walked away first.